Published on the 10/03/2026 | Written by Heather Wright

From optimisation to value in an AI world…

FinOps is undergoing a decisive transformation, with cost management efforts spreading well beyond cloud to become a proactive, technology-wide discipline – with AI firmly in sight.

The State of FinOps 2026 report, from the FinOps Foundation, shows practitioners are now applying FinOps practices across multiple technology categories, with 90 percent managing or planning to manage SaaS, 64 percent handling software licensing, 57 percent managing private cloud and 48 percent overseeing data centre costs. SaaS, licensing and AI are now normalised parts of the FinOps remit.

“FinOps has become a technology value practice moving at the speed of cloud.”

It’s a broadening the FinOps Foundation says is now the norm as organisations chase consistent, value-oriented governance across their entire IT estate. (So great is the change, that the Foundation has updated its mission from ‘Advancing the people who manage the value of the cloud’ to advancing the people who manage the value of technology.)

At the centre is AI – both managing it and using it. The sixth annual report identifies FinOps for AI as the top forward-looking priority and AI cost management as the number one skillset teams must now build. Almost all respondents – 98 percent – now manage AI spend, up from 63 percent in 2025 and 31 percent two years ago, with AI investment spreading across public cloud, SaaS platforms, data centres and private cloud deployments as organisations scale generative AI and machine learning workloads.

“The agenda is dual: Manage AI spend and apply AI to improve FinOps team productivity and the value of AI initiatives,” the Foundation notes. Smaller organisations are balancing AI alongside foundational FinOps work. For larger organisations, however, AI is increasingly treated as a dedicated domain. Either way, teams are preparing for AI-related value management.

The shift reflects the practical complexity of AI economics. AI consumption can vary wildly depending on usage while metrics such as cost-per-token, cost-per-inference and cost-per-training-epoch can complicate forecasting, allocation and showback or chargeback models.

With spend rising and accountability increasing, many organisations report being told to self-fund AI investments through optimisation savings, tying traditional FinOps work directly to strategic technology enablement. However, 53.4 percent also acknowledge they have difficulty understanding the full scope of AI spending, and 40.1 percent say identifying the value derived from spending on AI is a challenge.

Those broader pressures were also highlighted in Flexera’s 2026 IT Priorities Report which showed the operational and financial strain AI is placing on IT budgets globally. The report, which included a survey of 834 IT decision makers in companies with 100+ employees across the Australia, the US, UK and Germany, shows 80 percent of IT leaders say spend on AI applications has increased and 36 percent believe they’re overspending on AI. It noted the ‘critical challenge’ IT leaders now face of preventing cloud overspending in an AI-driven world and the growing importance of FinOps practices.

At the same time, Flexera’s report shows 73 percent of IT leaders reported SaaS and cloud infrastructure costs were up, and 67 percent said cloud costs weigh heavily on their budgets – a trend strengthening the case for disciplined, cross-scope FinOps practices.

Flexera also highlights widespread visibility and governance challenges, noting that IT visibility gaps pose organisational risk, and 58 percent have encountered issue due to unsanctioned SaaS usage.

Rising influence

The State of FinOps report, which is drawn from a survey of nearly 1,200 shows FinOps’ organisational footprint has also expanded. Seventy-eight percent of FinOps teams now report to the CTO or CIO, up 18 percentage points since 2023, signalling FinOps’ transition from a finance-aligned function to a technology-embedded discipline.

Those engaging with executives were much more likely to influence technology selection, with those with C-suite engagement, rather than just ‘director level’ showing 2-4x more influence over technology selection.

FinOps leaders are increasingly participating in strategic provider negotiations, multi-year investment decisions and M&A technology due diligence, with some influencing decisions about labour versus AI technology investment.

There’s also a shift left happening, with financial requirements are being embedded into financial requirements earlier in the engineering and product lifecycles, allowing teams to make informed decisions pre-deployment, rather than remediating after the bill arrives. Pre-deployment architecture costing has emerged as a top desired tool capability and FinOps teams are engaging with platform engineering and enterprise architecture teams, building pricing calculators and offering pre-deployment guidance. However, the Foundation warns, incentives haven’t caught up and there’s a need to identify how to give developers credit for ‘shift-left’ activities.

The report also shows FinOps practitioners are growing outside of the traditional stronghold of North America, including in Asia Pacific.

While no specific reference is made to Australia and New Zealand findings, the broad themes map closely to local developments, where cloud dependence, AI experimentation and governance mandates are reshaping financial oversight.

And one final takeaway from the report: It shows more respondents are now prioritising governance, forecasting, organisational alignment and managing expanding technology areas then optimisation and efficiency alone. “Mature practices increasingly focus on unit economics, AI value quantification and influencing technology selection, reflecting FinOps evolution from tactical function to strategic discipline,” it says.

“The technology area data speaks for itself: SaaS, licensing, private cloud, data centre, AI, and even labour are now normalised parts of the FinOps remit, managed with the same discipline once reserved for public cloud infrastructure,” the Foundation says. “FinOps has become a technology value practice moving at the speed of cloud.”